Leave it outside of the editor but make it an obviously clickable button. I'll hopefully make a plugin to do this in the next week or two and add a link here.

Any work to clarify that this is actually part of the rest of the UI would be useful. You could try to wrap a gray border around it to give it a feeling of attachment to the MCE toolbar.

I imagine it must be difficult for a new user to figure how to upload media with the current minuscule icon.

I like Jane's comments that the visual/html switch should be a unified toggle rather than two buttons, although I also think it fits nicely as tabs on the same line as the permalink (see mockup linked below). I also think that the upload icon should come first, rather than being grouped in the middle with links.

Finally I think perhaps the upload icon should/could be visually distinct from the other icons AND potentially the icon (if not the whole content box) being a drag and drop zone to shortcut the modal popping up... see mock up: http://bit.ly/vNsrHm

Good work!

Coincidentally, I was just telling Matt the other day that I wanted to do pretty much this exact same thing next time around. His response was that when the upload trigger used to be in the toolbar that no one could find it. I pointed out that back then it was a generic icon, and that using the nav camera+note icon made it more recognizable.

When we have disagreements about things like this, I usually get to a final decision by testing, so per Eric Mann’s suggestion on the blog post, this shouldn’t go on Trac yet (Ideas forum with a tweet linking to it was perfect, and it obviously got my attention) , but should be done as a plugin. Once there’s a plugin, I can run some usability testing with WP users to see how it goes. If the revamp doesn’t slow people down/confuse them as Matt suggested it would, that’s the point at which we would move on to Trac and begin an enhancement ticket.

In the meantime, it would be great for you to join the UI group, where specific design improvement challenges like this are posed/comped/discussed to help with the development of core. http://make.wordpress.org/ui

Now that we have a nice all-in-one uploader and media insert button, I don’t think it’s still necessary to have it staying alone above the post editor. Plus, if I follow your “just write” concept, I think it is more disturbing than useful.

I suggest:

1 -- The removal of this upload/media button in order to place it in the toolbar. It’s (just) a tool we can use to embellish the text but it is not the main component of the post/page editor. It doesn't help you to write.

2 -- If we move this tool, we could also move the Visual/HTML toggle, which is another tool, the same way so we can reduce the white space between the title field and the editor.

3 -- Let's fade away the permalink modifier when it's not "hover" or "focus".

I wrote a note about that and posted some pictures to mockup the concept on my blog. See this post.

Thanks for reading this!

Side note: if one day you consider moving the media button, please don't let the visual/html toggle alone because it would be the same again and again.